It's 8pm on a sunny June evening and Liz, landlady of the Vulcan in Cardiff, is showing me her urinals. Normally, I'd struggle to respond, but, after an hour in the company of the pub's most ardent admirers, I'm intrigued.

I'm here to meet John Williams, novelist and founder of the Laugharne festival; his wife, the musician turned novelist Charlotte Greig; and poets Peter Finch, Ifor Thomas and Morgan Francis. Over the past decade, the pub, with its brown porcelain latrines, faded depictions of maritime Cardiff, tattooed darts players and retired dockers, has become their spiritual home.

It was here in 2000 that Williams realised a literary renaissance was happening in Wales and decided to compile his Wales Half Welsh anthology of new writing. And it is Williams ("the Vulcaniser"), author of The Cardiff Trilogy, who tends to organise their gatherings. Tonight's crowd forms the inner circle, but writers such as Niall Griffiths and Rachel Trezise swing by when they're in town. The only real rule is that amateurs aren't welcome.

Keen to escape the solitude of writing, they are as likely to be found debating politics or music as reading someone's latest poem. "It's a myth that writers sit around talking about how to make their fourth paragraph work," says Finch. "But," adds Greig, whose debut novel, A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy, was published in 2007, "you need a community of writers around you." For Francis, the group reinforces "that there is such a thing as the imagination, that being creative can be important".

The writers travel to each others' readings, but they've shared their most memorable moments in the Vulcan, moments such as Williams drowning his sorrows after pulling a book back from the publisher to rewrite it. But nothing has stirred them as much as their latest project - to save "this sanctuary of ordinariness" from closure. Let's hope its demolition is one ending they never have to write.